A touch of attitude spices Foxy billboards

Our Salinas, Calif., reporter Mike Hornick sent in a picture of a billboard beside a highway in his area.

“Supersize This,” the sign read, next to what resembled a french fry sleeve with the Foxy organic label on it that was filled with celery sticks.

It caught Mike’s eye and made me smile too.

The “Supersize This” campaign is set to run through 2013 in New Jersey, Boston and Buffalo, N.Y., said Matt Seeley, vice president of marketing with The Nunes Co., a Salinas-based vegetable grower-shipper that markets under the Foxy brand.

The campaign seems a nice riff on the 2004 movie “Super Size Me” but not as preachy.

I appreciate the touch of attitude.

We often seem so afraid of alienating someone somewhere that it is nice to see something with an understated piquant taste of snark. A touch is enough.

“We tried to have a little fun with it and have a little edge,” Seeley said.

Billboards are a key element of marketing plans at The Nunes Co., Seeley said.

Television and radio advertising is expensive, he said, and the impact so fleeting.

“We’ve stuck with outdoor advertising — you can’t turn it off,” he said.

The billboards are concentrated in key locations. In Boston, for instance, commuters and others see them along Interstate 93, which cuts right through the heart of the city. This reaches a wide swath of potential consumers of Foxy products.

It reaches a group of potential consumers that, say, advertising on subways or bus routes could not.

I wonder what marketing of organics can suggest to marketers of conventionally grown produce.

In November, The Packer published an Organics Marketing special section. In it, Simcha Weinstein, director of marketing for Albert’s Organics, Bridgeport, N.J., said people don’t just buy a product.

“They buy the concept of what that product will do for them or help them do for themselves,” Weinstein told The Packer’s Melissa Shipman.

So when people buy organic products they are buying more than just organically grown fruits and vegetables.

They are buying a sustainable future for themselves, their families and future generations, he said.

Yes, I tend to agree.

Is that a lot to read into a billboard with two words and a picture placed in key locations? And a smidge of attitude.

And, of course, advertising the product of a competitor for Weinstein’s company.